Describing the scope of Obama's terrible spending

Byron York:

Republican strategists have a problem. The scale of what President Barack Obama proposes to do to the American economy is so enormous, so far-reaching and so potentially disastrous that the opposition party is having a hard time describing it.

“How do you translate the numbers into something that people can grasp to represent the broader problem?” a Republican pollster asked in a recent conversation. John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders would love to hear an answer, but the pollster didn’t have one.

GOP message mavens are struggling with something that academics call “insensitivity to scope.” It affects us all; we can understand something on a small scale but have a difficult time comprehending the same thing on a massive scale.

Insensitivity to scope is a major obstacle to understanding the Obama administration’s $3.6 trillion 2010 budget. People simply have trouble understanding a number so big. A recent poll asked Americans how many million are in a trillion. Twenty-one percent of respondents got the answer right — it’s a million million. Most people thought it was a lot less.

Republicans are facing that obstacle as they try to explain the dimensions of Obama’s spending plan. The GOP pollster told me he tries to explain it by asking people to think of a dollar as a second — one dollar, one brief tick of your watch. A million seconds, the pollster explained, equals eleven days. A billion seconds equals 31 years. And a trillion seconds equals 310 centuries.

The task of educating voters got a little more urgent Monday, when the government announced the not-terribly-surprising news that federal tax revenues will be smaller this year than previously thought. After a review of the Obama budget’s numbers before formal submission to Congress, Budget Director Peter Orszag said this year’s deficit will be $1.841 trillion — $89 billion more than previously estimated. If you’re listening to the ticks of your watch, that’s about 570 centuries.

You may remember last week that Obama proposed, with much fanfare, $17 billion in budget cuts. Now, his budget director announces that the deficit will go up by $89 billion. “A paperwork change increased the size of the deficit more than five times greater than the savings they proposed last week,” one key Republican Senate aide told me. The deficit will likely grow again in a few months when the budget office does a routine midyear review.

And it will grow bigger still if Obama’s remarkably optimistic predictions for the economy don’t pan out. On Monday the White House forecast that the economy will be growing at a 3.5 percent annual rate by the end of this year. That’s a nice growth rate in a non-recession year. But now? After the economy shrank at an annual rate of 6.1 percent in the first quarter? “They say we’re going to have almost a 10-point swing in the span of six months,” the GOP aide told me. “That’s a really rosy scenario.”

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Then there is the cap and trade disaster that will make sure that the economy shrinks rather than grows because of increased energy costs imposed by his green tax. On top of that is the high cost of his rationed health care plan that will make everyone wait in line for less health care. Let me be one of the first to say that Obama is off to a good start was the worst President in history. The only way anyone will ever match his spending spree is with the inflation that is sure to follow.